Chart Of The Day

1. The 2012 GOP platform is a total outlier, presumably designed to intimidate the Saracen hordes biding their time for Obama’s re-election.

2. Judging entirely by the text of its platforms — for by their words, or works, or whatever, ye shall know them — the party clearly had no use for God from its founding through the 1960s. By my sophisticated calculations, the godlessness of the Republicans from 1856-1956 likely accounts for the successful passage of 93 percent of Progressive Era legislation and 97 percent of the New Deal.

That's also a superb graph revealing just how new the God fixation is in American politics. Of course there was always constant, rote invocation of the Almighty in decades passed – but the neurotic quality of rigid, truth-denying fundamentalism is waxing particularly strongly right now, and not just in Christianity. Head to the West Bank settlements or Timbuktu. It's real and it's in America too.